


Flickers

by Leonawriter



Category: Compilation of Final Fantasy VII
Genre: F/M, Local Idiot Bird Man Needs Help, Post-Dirge of Cerberus, Slow Burn
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-12-29
Updated: 2018-12-29
Packaged: 2019-09-29 17:01:28
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,050
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17207375
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Leonawriter/pseuds/Leonawriter
Summary: An ex-SOLDIER walks into her bar one stormy day. There should be a punchline in there somewhere, and maybe there is somewhere later on down the line when Tifa figures out why he seems familiar.Until then, all she can do is worry. But at least that's something she's used to by now.





	Flickers

The first time she sees him, he's a bedraggled mess coming in from the cold of a November downpour, and she notices a few things, there and then - that he must be freezing, that his clothes have seen better days, that he used to be SOLDIER by the uniform he's wearing underneath that mess of a coat and the way his eyes glowed in the dim light that came from the way the storm had the electric flickering.

There's a flicker of recognition, a flicker of unease, but she shoves them down and away, only keeping the caution needed to know the new stranger and former SOLDIER wasn't going to be putting her other patrons at risk, let alone Marlene and Denzel. Serves him with the same wary politeness she usually reserves for the Turks.

He's still there when the others trickle away for the night, off to their homes and their beds and their families and friends. She'd noticed a while back that he kept stealing glances at her, at the rest of the bar, as if there's some sort of mystery he's trying to pick apart. He's still there after she's had to drag one man out practically by his shirt.

She turns to him when there's no one else left.

"Don't you have anywhere better to be?"

He jerks when spoken to, as though he'd somehow forgotten he wasn't alone, which Tifa couldn't imagine being easy, with the amount of noise that'd been going on before.

Or maybe it's that he just wasn't used to being spoken to, a voice in her head said, the same one that oh-so-helpfully said that he reminded her of nothing more than Cloud, unmoving where he'd practically collapsed by the train station in Midgar, with hardly any of him left.

"Not exactly, no." She'd almost say that the voice sounds at odds with the man, all cultured and refined compared to the mess of tatters he'd found himself in, but then - wasn't that just the case with everyone, nowadays? One tragedy after another. No one had enough to really be thought of as  _well off._ Not even the ones who  _had_ been, once. "My first introduction to SOLDIER having... declined in popularity was verbal assault and attempted physical assault at the only other establishment I found."

Tifa's eyebrows rose, at that.

"That so?" It wasn't like she'd not heard  _stranger_ things - after all, Vincent had been out of the loop for, what was it? Nearly thirty years, give or take. "SOLDIER's had a bad reputation for a while now, so I hardly find that surprising. Especially after Deepground," she added, to gauge his reaction, see just how much he was clueless about.

She didn't know if she should feel relieved or not that his reaction was to wince, and look away.

"...Lose someone, huh?"

It's a while before he answers, and in that time she's almost given up - thinking that maybe, it was just his own business that he didn't want to spill to some stranger he'd only just met. 

She's wiping down glasses, going through her routine of shutting the bar down properly for the night, when she hears him speak again.

"I... thought I could help," he's saying, and it's striking to her just how  _bitter_ he sounds. "Even just  _once._ " There's a creak of leather, something she recognises intimately as a gloved fist clenching, before it relaxes again. Something that makes her tense, because she still doesn't know how safe the man is, if he's going to put the kids at risk, and yet- "Sometimes, I wonder if everything I touch is doomed to degrade and die. It  _would_ serve a certain poetic justice."

Tifa sighed.

"Well, at least you'll  _admit_ what you're feeling. They say that's always the first step."

The stranger snorted. 

"An old friend of mine would say that it would be harder to keep me quiet," he said, and although there was a certain amount of humour in it, it was full of melancholy, as well.

"Was... that who you lost?"

He shakes his head, and for a moment she wonders if this friend of his is out there somewhere, not knowing where he was, waiting for him. And then he laughs, bitterness and hard edges, and for a single spine-chilling moment she remembers Sephiroth - a memory, or a memory of a memory, she's not sure which and she isn't sure if it matters - and she has to force herself to remember that Sephiroth is  _gone,_ that this ex-SOLDIER, no matter who he was or what he'd done,  _wasn't Sephiroth._

"What? Oh, no... I lost them a long, long time ago," he said once the laughter had died down. And then he looks exhausted again. "We weren't even all that close. I should have hated him - I should. And yet, I... thought I could help," he added, echoing his own words from before.

Her heart was still beating hard in her chest, and she was sure that there was a lot here that she wasn't aware of, that she wasn't in on, but - even so.

"Helping people isn't ever wrong." She felt that it needed to be said. "Just because it doesn't work out the way you wanted it to, even if you end up losing them in the process... it's still not wrong. What's worse is not doing anything at all, even though you can still do  _something."_

He flinches, and she wonders if she's hit a nerve.

Good. Maybe if she has, he'll stop wallowing in his own guilt over - whatever it was that he had or hadn't done.

When he looks at her again, there's something like steel in his eyes, something she recognises in Cloud from all the times he'd told her just with a look that she apparently had no idea what he'd been through, and maybe on anyone else it would've worked, but no matter that she wasn't quite as strong as she had been when they'd all fought Sephiroth, she was still the same person, and she wasn't going to be intimidated by some SOLDIER who looked like what the cat had dragged in.

He left not long after that, Marlene creeping down the stairs not long after the door shut to ask her what had happened.


End file.
